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Switchblade Sisters

Synopsis

So Easy to Kill, So Hard to Love

A tough gang of teenage girls are looking for love and fighting for turf on the mean streets of the city! Bad girls to the core, these impossibly outrageous high school hoodlums go where they want ... and create mayhem wherever they go!

Despite all of the life and death stakes in the action, the big DRAMA is rooted in the friendships and relationships of the teen women. This could be Mean Girls or "My So Called Life" or something along those lines save for the knife fights and gun battles and Shakespearean power plays, but there ya go: that's what makes this movie so damn special.

Loved when Switchblade Sisters features black clad leather chapeau denim on denim fierce femmes gunning down men in the streets like awful sweat-drenched hogs. Too bad these Jezebels spend most of the movie fighting over a scumbag rapist. More girl gang sisterhood of blood and chains domineering crooked dick lunkheads in a torrent of violence and hate please! I wanted to watch that scene where Maggie presses her blade against a husky dude's face and makes him squeal 293847474828282737477474 more times. Same when she spits venom at a cop through knife fight blood and hissing rage. And when she shoots assault weapons with a pseudo Angela Davis and her militant clan. Dang the last half of this movie was FIRE!

Recommended reading - Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang for a more feminine JCO literati take on similar material.

This glorious slice of seventies exploitation is reputed to be one of Quentin Tarantino's favourite films and it's easy to see why though even Tarantino would be hard-pressed to come up with anything this mad or this subversive; it even manages to bring Maoist politics into the mix. It also manages to transcend the 'so-bad-it's-good' concept to exist in a netherworld all of its own. As you might guess from the title, this is a feminist gang-movie with the boys taking very much a back seat. Of course, 'acting' is non-existent but director Jack Hill seems to relish his casts limitations, wracking everything up to a Spinal Tap 11. Okay, it's certainly not for everyone but for those who can take it this is perversely enjoyable.

I know it's arguably Tarantino's favourite movie and it is very nice to try decode the well he's been drawing from all throughout his career, but "Switchblade sisters" is truly a bad film.

Poorly acted, poorly directed, poorly written, poorly shot... I know it's an exploitation film and this was par for the course, but it does feel like a porno from that era with all the sex scenes edited out. That's something I normally find difficult to swallow and if it hadn't been for the Tarantino angle, I'd have probably never even thought of watching this.

Very funny until you get to know and love (!?) the characters. Pretty ludicrous and entertaining as they're killing people left and right and at the same time telling a shakespearean story. Ain't that neat?!

A bizarre film in a lot of ways. It's stylistic but the plot is questionable. The more I think about the plot the more half stars I knock off. Violent and needs a trigger warning for sexual abuse. 70's feminism is angry and fatphobic and still focused on girl hate and fighting over a man, according to this film. But at the same time it's nice to see tough women in lead roles even if all their lines are acted with clenched teeth. Also sorry am I lead to believe that the woman who gets raped ends up falling for the guy and turning on a female friend and fights her for his sorry worthless ass? That is a sad story indeed.